The Pulse is Magnolia's message hub. Users communicate with each other and the system using the Pulse. Messages in the Pulse provide users with relevant runtime information about the system.

Pulse user interface

The Pulse has two tabs:

Tasks are typically related to a publishing workflow. Tasks have a status and an assignee. Users can go to the Pulse to see who owns a task and perform actions on it.

Messages are system and app messages. Messages are displayed to the user in the app where they currently work. They are persisted for reading later in the Pulse.

The select-all checkbox

The select-all checkbox in the Pulse is enabled by default and configurable:

Magnolia 5.6.2+: If the actual number of messages/tasks stored in the system is causing performance issues, admins can configure a threshold for the maximum number of selected items or completely disable the select-all checkbox. The configuration is possible under /modules/ui-admincentral/config/pulse/selectAll .

Node

Value

ui-admincentral

config

pulse

selectAll

enabled

true

threshold

150

Properties:

enabled

optional default is true

Disables the select-all function if set to false .

threshold

optional default is 1000

Defines the maximum number of items to be selected.

If the total number of items is greater than the configured threshold, an error message will be displayed to the user after clicking the select-all checkbox.

Messages

Messages are displayed to the user in apps using banners. Unlike alerts and notifications, messages are persisted in the repository and can be read later in the Pulse. The system stores a separate copy of the message for each user in the messages workspace.

Sending messages

Tasks

Tasks make collaboration better. They have a clear status and an assignee. Users can go to the Pulse to see who owns a task and perform actions on it. Magnolia uses human tasks in the publishing workflow. When an editor publishes a page, the system creates an approval task and sends it to the publishers group. Under the hood we use the jBPM workflow engine's user task feature. See also Custom tasks and User tasks in Magnolia workflow documentation.

Unlike messages, tasks are not persisted for each user. Tasks are a single persisted entry shared by different users and groups, so all can see the same task and its state.

Tasks have five states:

New: New tasks waiting to be assigned to a user..

Assigned: Tasks assigned to a user.

Resolved: Tasks that have been resolved successfully.

Failed: Tasks that were approved but did not run successfully.

Scheduled: Tasks scheduled for later publication.

Please note that a task may also be Archived . Such a task is not shown in the ALL TASKS tab of the Pulse at all (5.5.4+) or shown with the "–" (dash) marker in the Status column (pre-5.5.4). An Archived task is still stored in the repository and may be re-opened if necessary.

Example: tasks in the publishing workflow

Eric, a content editor, publishes a page. The task is sent to the publisher group. All members of the group can see the task. Peter, a content publisher, or any other member of the group, can assign the task to themselves.

The task moves from the New to the Assigned tab. Other publishers, for example superuser, can see the task, who it is assigned to, and re-assign it to themselves.